Education:

I received my BA from Stanford University in Japanese

MAs in Linguistics and Anthropology and my PhD in Anthropology from UC Davis.

Biography:

Research Interests

My research includes three areas: 1) language and gender, 2) linguistic ideology and speaking practice, particularly as they relate to emotional expressivity and narratives of self, and 3) Japanese writing practices.

Gender, as an aspect of social identity, is performed and, in this sense, is role-relationally inhabited by participants in interaction. Like all such categories, it is locked into the dialectic of orders of indexicality and is also frequently tropically performed. My work shows the indexically layered ways in which, and degrees to which, women and men inhabit particular interactional stances as they are encoded in particular linguistic forms in Japanese and how these are related to everyday gender-display by such linkages.

Dominant models of Japanese linguistic practice stress uniformity, harmony, and consensus. They also stress the gendered nature of Japanese linguistic practices. Real Japanese people who are not -- by virtue of their regional, gender, or other identities -- identifiable as “average” speakers and real speaking choices which are not accounted for by the specified language usages of the normative speaker in normative situations are, thus, effectively erased from the record. My most current work illustrates ways in which language-gender ideology as a cultural model is utilized in literature and mass media, particularly in popular romance narratives.

Recent Publications

Okamoto, Shigeko and Janet S. Shibamoto-Smith. (2016) The Social Life of the Japanese Language: Cultural Discourses and Situated Practice. Cambridge/New York: Cambridge University Press.

Shibamoto-Smith, Janet S. (2011) Honorifics, "politeness," and power in Japanese political debate. Journal of Pragmatics 43(15: 3707-3719.

Shibamoto-Smith, Janet S. (2011) When Manners Are Not Enough: The Newspaper Advice Column and the "Etiquette" of Cultural Ideology in Contemporary Japan. In Jan Bardsley and Laura Miller (eds), Manners and Mischief: Gender, Power, and Etiquette in Japan:178-195. Berkeley CA: University of California Press.

Giving matters at UC Davis. For more than a century, donors have been helping the university address the issues that matter most to California, the nation and the world. The Department of Anthropology is dedicated to achieving excellence. Your gift can help.